City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [2]
Stan wasn’t especially happy to see me. The night I arrived, his birthday, I sat on his doorstep till dawn but he never came home. The next night he met me, but somewhat reluctantly. He was living with two other actors, one of them a hot older man of thirty named Paul Giovanni, who was playing The Boy in the original production of The Fantasticks, which became the longest-running musical in off-Broadway history. Stan was besotted with the cool, ironic Paul, but he did let me take him out to a gay restaurant. Of course I knew about gay bars, but the idea that gays might want to socialize and feed with one another—and in public!—seemed a fascinating new possibility. Gay liberation would not take off until 1969, but when it did, it seemed to be the final piece to a puzzle that we’d all been toying with for five or six years and slowly assembling. Maybe because visible gays were becoming more and more numerous, we were finally reaching a critical density.
Throngs of gay men were in the streets of the West Village (and a few women were visible at bars such as Kookie’s and later the Duchess on Sheridan Square). The unisex look of the sixties, though it didn’t represent a serious change in attitudes, nevertheless made it easier to sneak in a dangling bracelet on a man’s wrist or a big turquoise brooch on a striped red velvet vest (it wasn’t an era known for its good taste). During the fifties it had been illegal in many communities for a woman to wear more than two items of male clothing—jeans, sweatshirt, and a cowboy belt could get a woman arrested; now they could wear T-shirts or boots if they wanted. Though interracial marriage was still illegal in many states, the Village was full of mixed couples (mostly “Negro” men, as we said then, and white “chicks”). Even the idea of a hippie counterculture—of a counter-anything—gave us an exciting new model of contemporary dissonance.
Two months later, in September 1962, Stan agreed to live with me in the little, dingy apartment I’d rented on MacDougal Street, and we stayed together for the next five years. He’d overstayed his welcome with Paul, but he’d decided not to go back to Michigan for his senior year. He wanted to try his luck as an actor. In that era, before there was any degree of widespread gay self-acceptance, it was extremely rare to find a gay couple who lived together openly as lovers, who’d acknowledged their homosexuality to their parents and friends and colleagues, who had a sense that they constituted a real romantic pair capable of being faithful to one another or if not sexually exclusive at least committed in some sense for the long haul.
I knew just three gay couples, all former students from the University of Michigan who’d moved to the big city and were trying on for size the novel experiment of living as a gay pair. I didn’t know—or even know of—any older gay couples. Stan and I took our “affair” so lightly that we had no idea of fidelity, though we didn’t discuss the rules of our relationship. We had no idea of growing old together. We never spoke to outsiders of our “partner” (the term didn’t exist then). Another gay friend might ask, “Are you and Stan lovers?” to which I’d respond, “Sort of.” It was all pretty murky, even to us. We seldom had sex with each other—and often it happened in the middle of the night, one of us wordlessly awakening the other out of need. Because we were gay, we routinely referred to ourselves as “sick,” which was only half a joke. We both saw shrinks, off and on.
Even our infidelities were comical. Tom Eyen, a young but already well-known playwright, picked me up one night (eventually Tom wrote Dreamgirls). After we had sex, he said, “You have the same carry-on in bed as this other guy I fucked yesterday—Stan. His name was Stan.” I couldn’t wait to get home to tease Stanley, and I wondered privately